There are rumours and murmurings heading in my direction suggesting that Ficlets may be on the AOL chopping block at some point in the near future. AOL have already shut down a lot of divisions, websites and projects that aren’t bringing them any money, and this site doesn’t seem to bring in any revenue for them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if AOL announced they’d be shutting the site down. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shut it down without giving us an advance warning. There are already issues logging in with an OpenID account that AOL seem unable or unwilling to fix.

If you like your ficlets, start backing them up. Take the ficlets you’ve written and copy + paste them into a .txt file or a Word document or something. If you have a blog, start cross-posting new ficlets there as well. Ficlets.com is home to some of the best writing I’ve seen in years, and I’d hate to see that disappear in the blink of an eye one night.

Hopefully I’m wrong. But it’s better to be safe than sorry.